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Farther Down The Rabbit Hole (20/3/2007) - Webster Tarpley On Malthusian Madness
__TOC__ Transcript Paula Gloria: Welcome to 'Farther Down The Rabbit Hole'. This is Paula Gloria and we have with us our very favorite guest, Webster Tarpley. So Webster, thanks for calling in. Webster Tarpley: Thank you Paula, it's always a pleasure. PG: And I want to remind you people - that you can go to youtube.com/paulagloria because after every interview with Webster, I post it immediately. So Webster, we're going to be talking today about 'Malthusian madness'. Now, what is Malthusianism and why is it so important to a lot of the work you do? WT: Well, we've got a previous broadcast, I think, where we talked about the fraud of global warming. And the problem with something like global warming is inaudible if you have a problem of this nature, what are the cognitive ideas that makes this possible? Why do people believe it? It's kinda like September 11th and the terror fraud - global war on terror. inaudible Why do people fall for such a thing? And the answer gets to be: something to do with neocon ideology, Carl Schmitt - Hitler's lawyer - Leo Strauss, things like that. What we've got today... PG: Oh Webster, there's one thing I want to slow you down on. A lot of people say that you're being dramatic when you say that the neocons are related to the Nazi's, and that you discredit your argument because of that. And I've heard you say that Hitler's lawyer was a Nazi. Now, does this mean that he was smarter than Hitler? WT: Well, it's just a simple fact - I mean, you don't have to comment on anybody's degree of intelligence. Adolf Hitler, German political leader, retained a lawyer for the Nazi party - the guy's name was Carl Schmitt. The case involved was the coup d'etat in Prussia in July of 1932 - that had to be argued whether it was legal or not. It had to be argued at the Constitutional Court of the Weimar Republic in Leipzig. And the person who argued the case - for Hitler, for the Nazi party - for the illegal government - the Nazi government in the state of Prussia - was Carl Schmitt. Carl Schmitt is the protector, and the guy who launched the career of Leo Strauss. He got Leo Strauss a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and sponsored his early career. Leo Strauss is openly the guru of all the neocons - and there it is. And anyone who denies that, is simply denying the obvious fact. The neocons go back to Hitler's lawyer - and what is most important is inaudible, but we've gotta move on to Malthus, or we will never... PG: Fine. Thank you for clarying that. WT: on unless we can deal with it. This is all written up, by the way, in my book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made In USA. And people who deny that connection simply haven't read 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made In USA, which can you get from Amazon and many other places. But let's rush back to Malthus. What we've got right now is a huge hysterical worldwide Malthusian campaign around global warming. What does this Malthus character signify? Malthus was a parson - he was a clergyman of the Church of England during the Napoleonic Wars - at the beginning of the 1800s, about 200 years ago now. And he wrote his books on population. He's associated with this famous argument that population increases geometrically - population goes 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and so on - but food supply increases arithmetically - 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, whatever that is. Those premises are absolutely wrong. inaudible that, for example today - that when you get a degree of economic development - and this is what we're seeing at least in some parts of the world - as soon as you bring people into the middle class, probably the last century is a good sample, then you bring people into the middle class. You take them out of peasant life, where the tendency is to have many children, and bring them into middle-class life, where the capital investment per child goes up in education and healthcare and so on - but the population begins to level off. So the geometric thesis is a fraud. And the other one is, of course, that - the arithmetic increase of food supply - does not obtain in real history. In other words, when you have periods of rapid technological innovation, you actually get increases in the food supply that are not arithmetic - that are at least, momentarily, geometric. So he's wrong on both points. And the thing about Malthus that always stays with his followers - is the systematic denial and exclusion of technology, science, innovation, improvements of methods, and so forth. In other words, the fruits of human reason are systematically denied by Malthus. So we're told with Malthus, that the human condition is that there's overpopulation - that poverty and misery are inevitable - and that science can do absolutely nothing to change this. It's a form - it's a severe historical and cultural pessimism. And, of course, Malthus was the main ideologue of the British Empire - this is very important. The most reactionary, inaudible formation of the past 250 years - something that dominated the world. The British Empire - India, Africa, Canada, Australia, all these places - but especially when they're dealing with non-white populations - the policies are all Malthusian. They're all aimed at wiping out populations. And I guess that's the other thing - if you have governments that try to implement Malthusian policies, then you've gonna have genocide - because that is the way they respond to what they think the predicament is. If you have Malthusian bureaucrats running a government, there's a very great danger that the policies that come out of it will be genocidal. And that's the case of the United States, Britain, and quite a few others today. Now Malthus, in many ways - he picks together - he summarises a mentality - which is typical of oligarchy. If we go back to the Archaic period in Greece about a 1000 BC and in the following centuries, there is, if you look in the ancient Greek writers, an explanation: Why did the Trojan War occur? (1,000 BC) And the answer to that is: "Well, the Trojan War was necessary, because there were too many people - too many humans oppressing the breast of mother Earth, and therefore there had to be this massacre". That is essentially Malthusianism in a nutshell. Specifically, Malthus was this country parson - and what he did was to copy - he's a plagiarist. This is what is very little known about. He's an intellectual fraud - he copies all of his ideas from a Venetian original. And this is Giammaria Ortes - last name. Very little known - but known to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and a couple of others. Marx actually says - he thinks he's a great guy. Giammaria Ortes was a defrocked Venetian priest. Around 1790, he wrote a book on population, where he formulated - for the first time - and this is his contribution, if you'd like - the notion of carrying capacity. Giammaria Ortes says that the absolute upper limit for the Globe is a population of three billion - and that was in 1790. And he says - we don't want to get to a situation where people are packed in like herrings in a barrel. Again, the Malthusian mindset. Ortes is also the inventor of the notion of a zero-sum game. He says - if one country gains, then it means that another country is automatically going to lose. He always imagines the world as a fixed, finite pie - again, not what you see empirically. Because technological improvements and science have been able to radically increase the size of the pie - but Ortes can not see this. And again, always this exclusion of technology - there's never an idea that science and technology can make things better. Ortes spent a lot of his time trying to figure out gambling. Let me just say in counting - because I can't do justice to the importance of Ortes - that all of Malthus and indeed, all of Jeremy Bentham, is based on this degenerate, Venetian original. Now, that gets us to the influence of this. Bentham - Jeremy Bentham - is the founder of British liberalism. He is the philosopher of utilitarianism - "the greatest good for the greatest number people" . Bentham is of course the founder of the British intelligence agencies in the beginning of the 19th century. Bentham is a kind of conveyor belt for Malthusian ideas to the British liberal party and to pretty much leftists around the world. If you know Charles Dickens - if you know a novel like 'Hard Times' - the Gradgrind school, the scraps, scraps, scraps of Thomas Gradgrind - that's pretty much Bentham and to some degree Malthus. Or - beg me - you know - the Christmas Carols of Uncle Scrooge - everyone has seen this. "Were there no prisons? Were there no workhouses?" - that's pure Bentham. And then, indeed, the famous rhyme: "If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population". Pure Malthus, by way of Bentham. The other one to mention is Charles Darwin and his doctrines - the struggle for survival, the survival of the fittest, and all this - is also based on Malthus directly. And it leads to Social Darwinism, and out of Social Darwinism - the notion that human society is a struggle of the law of the jungle, it's a kind of ideology that free-market ideologues have always loved. Then you get Nietzsche, Nietzsche and the will to power. And from this comes Nazism. So you can pretty much trace Malthusian thinking in various streams through the 19th century infecting leftists in one way - through Bentham - but then also coming back to impact the right-wing movements - in particular the ultra rightwing, or indeed Nazi movement, through Nietzsche. Now remember - Malthus was a dirty word in the 19th century if you were a progressive of any sort in the United States. In America - in particular - in other countries it was different. But in this country, you couldn't be a Malthusian - because people would say: "What? Malthus? That's pessimism - that's that British Empire guy". Notice that even Marx and Engels - who were both British agents, but had to appeal to leftists including in the United States - expressed tremendous contempt for Malthus. I can remember a time when the US left - was not Malthusian at all. Today, the disaster of American leftists is that they tend to be - heavily - Malthusian. The time of the pre-1968 period - Malthusianism was not widespread among leftists. It was rather a rightwing elitist doctrine among Social Darwinists and so forth. But then, of course, we had the Kennedy assassinations - Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, inaudible, Malcom X assassinations. The collapse of FDS, the coming of the Weathermen terrorist groups, the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 Kent State, McGovern and the defeat of McGovern. And then - a period since 1968 really - a process of continuous defeat, demoralisation, disorientation of leftists - especially... I would point to the Carter administration as a time when Malthusianism became very, very widespread. You can see that the turn of American leftists to Malthus is a fruit of defeat and despair. And now, since we come - hopefully - to the end of that 40-year cycle, the 1968 to 2008 cycle, it's time for leftists to put aside this suicidal, fatal flaw of the Malthusian. And this is what makes them so eager for the Al Gore/Prince Charles line on global warming. The two other incidents, of course, that are important in the coming of the Malthusian consensus on the left: the Three Mile Island incident, which of course is a provocation, it's staged. And the way that you can see that it's staged is that it happens within several weeks of the release of the film 'The China Syndrome' with Jane Fonda - about a nuclear reactor that blows up and goes presumably to the center of the Earth. The best information I have at the time on Three Mile Island - it was caused by a sabotage inside the plant by people who were ideologically motivated to cripple the cause of nuclear energy. In the case of Chernobyl about eight or so years later, I have it on high-ranking US Special Forces Command, that the Chernobyl incident was a conscious sabotage by CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) on the part of the US as part of a strategy to ruin and destroy the Soviet Union. And that worked. So that was Chernobyl in the spring of 1986. So - this is on the situation. The coming organized Malthusianism is associated with the Club Of Rome in particular. The Club Of Rome - the period in 1986 - the top people there were Aurelio Peccei, who was an old fascist - one of the Mussolini fascist movement - and Alexander King - who was a British ideologue. Alexander King once said to an interviewer: "The whole point of The Club Of Rome and the limits to growth, is to block and prevent third-world economic development, and make sure that the non-white populations of the world go into a phase of genocidal annihilation." And this is what they have obtained. The Club Of Rome then sponsored a book called "The Limits To Growth", and this was very interesting - it was in 1986. They said: "Well, let's calculate the known reserves - all of the relevant minerals. Let's start with oil and coal, and go on to the strategic raw materials, and magnesium and aluminum - and all the rest of it". And the said: "Well, we can calculate how many years of supplies and reserves we have left, and at the end of that - then the world will collapse. So what we've got to do, is to switch into a zero-growth mode to try to conserve what we have left". Now, this is not done, fortunately - the thesis was not followed. And about 30 years after they wrote the book, people went back and calculated the available reserves of all of those elements, and found that in every category, the main reserves in around 2000 were greater, and far greater, usually, than they had been in 1968. That, as time goes on, you find more reserves through a process of discovery and, most important, you develop more advanced technologies that allow you to consider as reserves, things that were not reserves at the earlier time. And of course, if you had a real technological revolution, you'd be defining new areas as resources. For example - if you had a thermonuclear fusion reactor, then your principal raw material could of course be sea water - which would change the equation rapidly. But this was the turning point - Alexander King, Aurelio Peccei and The Club Of Rome. Now, this doctrine was then embraced by Henry Kissinger in 1974. The infamous document is called: "National Security Study Memorandum 200" (NSM200), which says in its straight Malthusianism - that the growth of world population is a dire threat to the national security of the United States, because all those people are going to use up the scarce resources that we want and that we regard as the property of the US. In other words: inaudible and take it from there. So, since 1974, the United States government has been, officially, Malthusianism. And we can then add - under the Carter administration - Carter adds a very, very aggressive anti-nuclear campaign. Carter doesn't want anybody building nuclear reactors anywhere. Mainly - this is very simple - because if the Anglo-Americans control the Middle East - as they tend to do - they can use the oil in the Middle East to blackmail and control Europe and Japan - and prevent Europe and Japan from exerting a greater independence and autonomy within the world system. They want them very much under the thumb of New York and Washington, and not allow them any national independence or anything of the sort. The other thing is, of course, the Anglo-Americans control coal. The main coal reserves in the world are in Britain, or United States above all, and Australia. And if you control oil and coal and if you blocked nuclear, then you block everybody. So, "Global 2000" and "Global Futures". And Global 2000 And Global Futures were put in in the late 1970s under Carter through the efforts of Secretary Of State Edmund Muskie, Edmund Muskie of Maine at the time. And since then, the whole US government has been Malthusian. Now, I want to recommend people - there has been a very interesting documentary film on BBC Television - I think it is BBC Channel 4. And it is called "The Great Global Warming Swindle". And here we have scientists who took part in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talking about the outrageous practices of that very political, and very oligarchical and - really - very reactionary grouping - the IPCC. And people said: "Well, I tried to convince them that they were wrong, and they kicked me off". That was one guy. And another scientist says: "I tried to convince them, and they ignored me. But they wanted to keep my name on there - and I had to threaten to sue them to get my name taken off. Because they wanted to use my prestige to back up their bankrupt and unproven assertions." But the thing that I like to focus upon most, is that in the course of this interview, they have an economist from - I believe - Nigeria who comes on and says: "Look, the greatest barrier to the development of Africa and the other areas of the underdeveloped sector of the third world - is the global Malthusian movement - the global warming movement - in our own time. The dream of Africa is economic development, and these Malthusians tell us: 'you can't use your coal, you can't use your oil, you can't use nuclear' What are you supposed to use? They say: "solar cells and windmills"." And they show, actually, a hospital in Africa that tries to get energy out of a solar cell - and of course, you can't. You can either keep the refrigator for the vaccines going, or you can keep the light going so that you can operate - but you can't do both. And that's the problem of course with solar cells and windmills - is that they may sound attractive as ideas, but they don't produce the necessary density of power, and of course, that they require more energy in their construction than you're likely to get out of them in the useful lots. So the basic idea is: if you're interested in the right of every country in the world to human dignity and economic development - meaning an end to genocide - because right now we have 40.000 people a day who die of malnutrition, starvation and diseases that can be easily cured, such as diarrhea - you can cure that for 50 cents or so. If you want to do something about that, the main reason is underdevelopment - right? Most people - 60% of Africa has no access to electric current. And in this documentary, they show you a poor woman cooking dinner for her baby in a primitve shelter, and she's got a inaudible of fire with wood inside the house, and of course the house fills up with smoke, and it's clear that they're in danger of lung cancer from the smoke coming out of the fire. In other words, the smoke of cooking fires indoors in Africa is one of the leading causes of early death - it's one of the things that keeps the life expectancy so low. So I think - in these terms you can see that the oligarchy is interested in oligarchical privilege. The oligarchical arguments appeal to rich elitists, rich white elitists, if you will - in Europe, in the United States, and in similar areas. The way in which they express this is also - it's a moving target. When they started off in 1968, it was the limits to growth - the natural resources are gonna give up. Then we switch to Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb - there's overpopulation. Well, in the meantime, it turns out there's no overpopulation in that sense - it's all slowing down and we can see a time towards the middle of this century when it's actually going to go into a pretty flat curve. And Western Europe is heavily negative, and the United States would be negative if it weren't for large immigration. So there is no population bomb in that sense. Then they switch to the ozone hole and the ozone layer - this became a question of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC). And if you see Al Gore getting his hair sprayed, then that means he's putting chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. And then we end up with global warming. I've come to explain in the other programs that we're in a momentary mild warming that probably precedes another Ice Age - at least on the calendar we know of the last several hundred thousand years. It's very likely that the centuries ahead will bring a process of cooling, and that the main influences in this area are things like the sunspots cycles, solar activity, the dynamics of the Earth's orbit, the precession of the equinox and longer cycles. Cosmic rays have a very big influence on cloud formation and are a big force in the weather. And so, there is no real evidence that this is a anthropogenic or human-created phenomena. Now, if we look at the environmental movement, I think we can distinguish two groups. One is the group that has bought in to the global warming hysteria - spread by Gore, Prince Charles, and their friends. But then you've also got serious thinkers. And indeed, many of the founders of the modern environmentalist movement - who have seen that the concern for habitat and the preservation of the world - requires more advanced technology - not the freezing of technology and certainly not genocidal policies. Let me just quote a few: Stewart Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. And Stewart Brand is the most articulate, saying: "The notion of a population bomb is a fraud. The notion of being anti-urban is also a big mistake." In other words - cities are more efficient than suburbs. And above all, he says: "We've got to have a large-scale recourse to nuclear energy as a means of staving off possible global warming". And that's a serious argument. What he is saying is: "Modernize - do something you want to do anyway as a prudent hedge against possible global warming" - if such a thing occurs, but no matter what occurs under this, you'll be way ahead. Similarly, James Lovelock, he is the author of the Gaia hypothesis. He also, I think, he takes global warming seriously, but he says again: "The answer to that, is to build nuclear reactors." In other words - to evolve means to adapt. New and more modern technology that will allow you to deal with whatever comes. Patrick Moore of Greenpeace, one of the founders of Greenpeace, appears in this BBC documentary and he points to the reactionary results of the global warming movement, and he is also in favor of nuclear energy. He wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post on that theme a while agoThe Washington Post: Going Nuclear (By Patrick Moore) (16/4/2006). Bishop Hugh Montefiore of England is one of the founders of Friends of The Earth, and he came to the same conclusionsThe Independent: Global warming row goes nuclear as bishop quits Friends of the Earth (22/10/2004). So, four founding fathers, all pro-nuclear - and again it's because they - these are people who take global warming more seriously than I would - but what they're recommending are policies that we can advocate. inaudible - they represent the need to modernize society in any case. And then I would also mention the Virginia Independent Green Party with Glenda "Gail" Parker in the 2006 Senatorial election. She ran - recommending - a 5.000 mile magnetic levitation railway network for the US. In other words, transcontinental Maglev. These are the most modern trains you can get - they travel at about 600 kilometers a hour, so maybe almost 400 miles a hour. And she also wanted a massive turn towards urban mass transit - in other words, rebuild the entire mass transit system - subways, metros, lightrail, on PG: Two minutes, Webster. Webster, two minutes... WT: on So now, suppose if you don't know what to do - I would say the following: let's go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. The New Deal contained a little remembered feature called the ShelterbeltWikipedia: Great Plains Shelterbelt. And the Shelterbelt was a line of trees that went from North Dakota on south, across the great poles of the United States. And it amounted to about a quarter of a billion trees. If you think that there's global warming and too much CO2, why not plant a billion trees? Why not invest in the reforestation of chief parts in the world? Why not allow Brazil economic development so that they can stop the modernization and clearing of the Amazon rainforests? But again, you can't just do this by shutting people down. You've gotta give them modern, attractives economic alternatives. Capital investments - a turn towards greater energy density. The other question is, of course, a turn towards nuclear energy - it's the only way you're gonna avoid burning coal or oil, inaudible genocide. And as I say, my axiom on all this stuff is: "No genocide. Not ever, not under any circumstances". We've got a kind of a pervasive genocide going on in the world today - it's 40.000 people that are dying of malnutrition, starvation and diseases like diarrhea. We got genocide inaudible in the world right now... PG: interrupting Webster, thank you for very much for joining us... WT: on therefore we've got to have world economic development as a way out. PG: Great. Thank you, Webster Tarpley. This is Paula Gloria with Farther Down The Rabbit Hole. And we'll be hearing more from Webster and solutions to the economic and environmental problems. Thanks, Webster. Related material Giammaria Ortes:The Decadent Venetian Kook Who Originated The Myth of "Carrying Capacity" - by Webster Tarpley Audio/video downloads Video: Webster Tarpley on Malthusian Madness Audio: Webster Tarpley on Malthusian Madness References Category: Webster Tarpley Category: Farther Down The Rabbit Hole Category: Transcripts